“… A lot of these prisoners are in for minor possession of marijuana charges,” one person wrote on Facebook.

“Stop arresting for non-violent crimes. Legalize and regulate,” another said.

Drug arrests clog American detention centers – there’s no doubt about that. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as of April, drug offenses constituted 46 percent of jail populations. Statistics from The Sentencing Project are even starker. In 1980, in local and county jails, 17,200 people were locked up on drug charges. By 2015, that number exploded to 171,245.

That’s all drug offenses, of course – not just weed. And while people still get nabbed for carrying around a dime bag, the idea that pot arrests are to blame for overcrowding at the Vanderburgh County jail is –

“Total B.S.,” Sheriff Dave Wedding said on Friday. “… Most people who are arrested for simple marijuana possession are in and out in a pretty quick time frame. We don’t have people who had a joint or two stay in our jail.”

Take a 20-year-old kid I spotted in the recent booking reports last week – curly-haired, grinning in his mugshot. He got snared on possession. Even with a resisting arrest charge tacked on, he was released within a few hours. In Wednesday's bookings, out of the people who stayed in jail more than just a couple hours, zero were booked on pot charges.

“People who remain in jail are the ones who commit crimes over and over again,” Wedding said. He rattled off burglary, robbery, serial drunken drivers, etc.

“Just read the newspaper this morning and you will see some very serious offenses that have occurred,” he said. “… The news is full of people who abuse children, child pornography, heroin overdoses, people firing guns into other people’s homes, assaulting someone, thefts over and over again.

“We have some pretty serious offenders in our jail.”

Another reader complaint stemmed from Indiana’s sentencing laws, and how they’re supposedly too harsh against weed enthusiasts. Thing is, the state overhauled sentencing structure in 2014 and downgraded punishments for low-level drug offenders.

According to a 2014 Courier & Press story by Mark Wilson, the changes reduced marijuana possession to a class B misdemeanor. Dealing is more serious – class A – but pot-centric felonies are hard to come by.

“I don’t think I have had one (felony marijuana possession) since July 1 (2014),” Camala Cooley, a deputy prosecutor, said then. “You really have to have a lot of marijuana for a felony."

Vanderburgh County is home to the state's first drug treatment court. There's also Therapeutic Work Release, overseen by judges Wayne Trockman and David Kiely, which helps keep offenders out of jail -- or in for a shorter time -- and helps them find work and develop coping skills once their sentences end.

Of course that’s not good enough for legalization advocates. As the Facebook commenter said, “legalize and regulate.” I agree with her. If Indiana set up a state marijuana exchange, we wouldn’t need no gas tax to fund infrastructure upgrades.

It won’t happen anytime soon. State lawmakers are ridiculously scared of anything pot-adjacent. They whiffed for three years before finally legalizing non-THC hemp oil to treat children with epilepsy.

Meanwhile, Heather Steans, a state senator in Illinois, told me in April that our cash-strapped neighbor to the west could have legalized recreational pot within a couple years.

That is, if the federal government lets it happen. Attorney General Jeff Sessions spends every night locked in a subterranean bunker, watching “Reefer Madness” with a pistol clutched in his fist.

Even so, attitudes toward locking up drug offenders are changing. Gov. Eric Holcomb recently announced an initiative to allow HIP 2.0 participants to pay for methadone treatments with Medicaid (if a federal Republican health overhaul doesn’t gut Medicaid expansion). And more and more, law enforcement and politicians are pushing for rehabilitation, not prison, for opioid users.

So it’s ridiculous to think Vanderburgh County deputies are stalking the hills, desperately seeking pot smokers to throw into a prison cell. More than anything, Wedding said, jail overcrowding is exacerbated by repeat offenders – people who have had “7, 8, 20 arrests” in the last four or five years. Many for more serious crimes.

“I think our judges and prosecutors do a pretty good job of working with offenders and releasing the ones that are reasonable to let out,” he said. “But sometimes people are not subject to bond. … People are not getting the message. We try to give them chances, and they’re not taking the chances given to them.

“I was the victim of a burglary last fall,” he said. “And you know what? As a victim of a crime, I want those people in custody for awhile.”